I’ll be honest: Sometimes there is simply so much pseudoscience that I just can’t keep up with it all. I had no idea, for example, that Brad Steiger was still actively producing pseudoscientific claims about reptilian species, lost civilizations, and other unproven things. I remembered him from Mysteries of Time and Space (1974) but apparently he’s been churning out variations on his 1970s books for the past forty years, leading up to his newest, an anthology called Legacy of the Sky People, which claims Adam and Eve were of extraterrestrial origin, following the speculations of William Le Poer Trench, the British MP who believed impossible things with improbable conviction. Specifically, it's about the Reptilian race of serpent-people most famously promoted by David Icke.

In an interview with Examiner.com, Steiger seems a bit confused about exactly what alternative claims he currently favors. The interviewer asked him his feelings about the ancient astronaut hypothesis, and he at first seemed less than enthusiastic. Despite apparently working with Giorgio Tsoukalos on the new book, he still believes ancient astronaut thinkers claim that ancient wonders were alien-built. Didn’t he learn that they’ve changed their minds and now claim only “inspiration” from the aliens to avoid the need for “proof”?

I am very open to certain elements of the Ancient Astronaut theme, but I also feel quite strongly about the thesis that I present in my Worlds Before Our Own, (Putnam, 1978) that we have had plenty of time for more than one evolution on this planet and that an advanced terrestrial culture thriving in a world before our own on Earth could have built all those wonders.

But in answer to the very next question, about the real identity of the Reptilians, Steiger made the following reply:

As early as 250 million years ago, these reptilian Star Gods visited our planet and began efforts to ac­celerate the evolution of certain terrestrial amphibi­ans and reptiles in an attempt to replicate their own culture on Earth. When these experiments in genetic engineering failed, they made a decision to focus upon evolving mammals. […] For whatever reason, they made a decision to accelerate the normal process of evolution and to fashion a rational creature before its time.

How would anyone know that the Star Gods were here 250 million years ago if he also claims human culture evolved all on its own after they left without alien involvement? I suppose he sees something like Lovecraft’s conception of various waves of Cthulhu Spawn, Elder Things, and Mi-Go filtering down from the stars in the distant past, yielding later to humans who reigned over Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu, but it sure sounds like he has stacks of mutually contradictory pre-written stock “ideas” that he pulls out without consequence for consistency. Or, he says whatever favors sales of his published books. (To be fair, he also suggests the Reptilians may have evolved on earth and are just pretending to be aliens, like the Doctor Who lizard creatures that live underground.) I’m sure most of you remember the discussion I’ve had recently about the Fallen Angels and the relationship of Genesis 6 (“there were giants in the earth in those days…”) and how this is related to Near Eastern stories of the Heroes as well as the old idea that earth was decaying from its former greatness. Well, Steiger has a different take, lifted point-for-point from Chariots of the Gods and the 1960s UFO-Bible theorizers:

If those allegedly smitten sons of God were actually extraterres­trial scientists conducting experiments on female mem­bers of the developing strain of Homo sapiens, rather than decadent heavenly beings sinning with Earth's daughters, they might well have been carrying out the directive to provide nascent humankind with a genetic boost.

And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. You can’t simply assert that if something is what it is not, then the consequences would be different from reality as it currently is. I should also mention that Steiger mistakenly states that the Book of Enoch claims that Noah’s mother was accused of infidelity with an angel, but this is actually the Genesis Apocryphon, the same text that gave Erich von Däniken so much trouble because its extremely fragmentary state makes it very hard to draw solid conclusions about the fine details of its content, let alone any extraterrestrials lurking in the lacunae. If Steiger's Examiner interview is anything to go on, his newest book looks to be even more discredited lies from the never-ending recycling program that is "alternative" history.